I said, "Tatyana, your daughter's waiting at school. Olga, your husband's going to want his dinner on time. And Natasha, you're very nice, but if you don't go home and pack you'll never make it to the Black Sea with your husband."
"What are you doing?"
"I have an appointment," I said, and left, as the Berioska shop was closing.
I went to the Bolshoi, and I noticed at the coat check and the buffet and the bar, Russian women gave me frank looks. It was not lust or romance, merely curiosity because they had spotted a man who probably had hard currency. It was not the sort of look women usually offered. It was an unambiguous lingering gaze, a half smile that said: Alay be we can work something out.
Moscow had a chastening effect on the tour group. They became very quiet and rather wary. They seemed actually afraid—something I had not expected. Was it the glowering soldiers and police? Or perhaps the repeated security checks, and having to show your hotel ID card before you were allowed into the lobby? Or was it the big bare buildings and wide streets? Ashley said he felt very small in Moscow.
Kicker winked and told me that in his three days in Moscow he had not left the hotel. He said he was afraid of being picked up and never heard of again.
"Why would they do that?"
"I was a Marine," he said. "They kill you for things like that in Russia. Let's get out of here. That's what I say."
It was a dark rainy afternoon when we set off from Yaroslav Station on the Trans-Siberian. The people in the group were nervous and chatty—glad to be going but apprehensive about what it would be like. Some had never spent a night on a train. They were faced with four nights to Irkutsk, living at close quarters—Americans in one compartment, British in another, Australians in a third, the nameless French foursome together. From the moment I was assigned to my compartment I knew it would be a splendid trip: I was alone. I had my Polish provisions, and chocolate and champagne that 1 had bought in Moscow. 1 had books, and my shortwave radio. I was looking forward to four days of bliss.
It is an unusual feeling in the Soviet Union, because they do not cater to the individual—they hardly seem to notice that the solitary traveler exists. If a person enters a Russian restaurant alone, it takes ages for him to be served; but the group of thirty-five drunken Finns chanting "Suomi! Suomi!" (Finland! Finland!) are fussed over and fed and are back on their tour bus in less than an hour. The Soviets prefer to feed large groups of people; they like herding them and lecturing them and counting them and sending them on their way. The individual is often dangerous and always a nuisance. Why bother with individuals when it is so much easier to bully a whole mob of tourists? The solitary traveler is despised and feared, and if he manages to triumph over the bureaucracy, he will find it twice as expensive as traveling with a group. Soviet society does not recognize the individual. The answer is simple: travel with a group and, when it suits you, drop out.
Traveling on my own I would never have had a sleeping compartment to myself. But two whole coaches had been allotted to this tour, and as the tour only filled one and a half coaches, some of us lucked out and were on our own.
That was why, rolling towards Kirov that first day, I was very happy—reading, drinking, listening to the news on the BBC, and writing down the odd episode with Olga and Natasha. It seemed to me like a sort of rest cure—idleness, and undemanding scenery, and they woke you for meals. And because we were in a group we were served before anyone else.
The experience of the Trans-Siberian Express is both monotony and monkish beauty: all day outside the loud, hurrying train it is birch trees and undulant hills, and after the utter blackness of night on that line, you see more birch trees and more undulant hills; and all that day too, until it seems more like wallpaper than a landscape—the kind of wallpaper that is so simple and repetitious that you look at the seams rather than the design.
There is no more austere sight in nature than birch trees set among small snow-covered hills, a study in black and white that is made starker by the crows and their nests, the fat black birds in the branches or looking deranged, flapping in the white sky.
We went through Perm, and passed the East-West marker at 1100 miles; and then to Sverdlovsk. The dwellings diminish and change from concrete towers in cities, to brick apartments on the outskirts, and then to houses made of planks that grow rougher until huts made of split logs appear, and these are replaced in the hinterland by plain log cabins with turf jammed into the chinks. In fifty or a hundred miles you see the entire history of Russian architecture.
Over lunch I was sitting with Blind Bob, Wilma and Morthole. Morthole brought us up to date on his rock collection: one from Berlin that had been thrown by a rioter, a chunk from Warsaw, a pebble from Moscow. He was planning to snatch something interesting at the twelve-minute stop in Omsk.
"These houses are horrible," Wilma said. She was wearing a wool hat over her baldness.
Morthole hadn't shaved and was looking whiskery. It always seemed ominous to me when a man stopped shaving on such a trip.
I remarked that they didn't seem to paint many of their houses out here—usually it was just the trim. In the poorer villages there was no paint at all. The log cabins and shacks just blackened in the rain and sun. And there was the proof out of the window: a whole settlement of black, chubby huts.
Wilma said, "I'd like to read something about it."
Blind Bob said, "Did you read that book by Paul Theroux, about taking this train?"
"No," Wilma said, and addressed me, "Did you?"
Flattening my face against the window I said, "Look at those birches! Isn't it amazing that you never see a fat one? They're all slender. Why do you suppose—"
"I read it," Morthole said, across the table. "The Gurneys have one of his books, I don't know which one. I saw Malcolm reading it in his compartment."
I made a mental note to avoid the Gurneys, but even so—sitting here—I felt like a hypocrite. But what was I to do? I hated being an object of attention. I had paid for my ticket, and so I had a right to my privacy. I hadn't deceived anyone; I had merely been economical with the truth. The alternative could be irksome—not just the conversations about writing books and "You should get yourself a word processor," but what I feared would be the duties of an unpaid guide. I had been on this train before; therefore, I ought to know whether that thermos bottle thing was a church steeple, and the name of that river, and if you could buy film in Irkutsk.
It was easy for me to keep to myself. I had my own compartment—plenty of space, plenty of provisions, the grapes, cookies, chocolates and tea that made being on the Trans-Siberian like a luxurious form of convalescence. It was a surprise to me that my little radio worked inside the train. At certain times of day I got the BBC news, and at other times Radio Australia or Voice of America. I listened to the Top Twenty, and the report of a Shakespeare Festival in China, and the fallout from the bombing of Libya. From the samovar at the end of the sleeping car, I got hot water for tea. And I divided the day into three parts and set myself tasks to perform: reading and writing.
That night a full moon was shining in the cloudless sky, and beneath it, water was lying everywhere, the melted snow flooding the birches. At midnight the moon shone from above and below this water and made the earth a glittering mirror on which leafless trees trembled, looking frail.
Every day is the same on the Trans-Siberian: that is one of its reassuring aspects. In itself it is not interesting, which is why it is such a pleasure to be a passenger and so maddening to write about it. There is nothing to write about. This train is an occasion, not a subject. It is more like an ocean liner than any other train I know—the solid steady travel, the sameness of the view. But in the thirteen years since I had last been on it, it had changed in many ways, and most of those changes were improvements. I assumed Gorbachev's cost-efficient approach to Soviet life was behind this. He had publicly criticized the uncaring attitude of Soviet workers: the old, grizzled provodniks on the sleeping car were gone, and in their place was a young couple who occupied one small compartment and worked in shifts. Gorbachev had denounced the drunkenness that was common in the country—the Trans-Siberian reflected this: a trip on it was no longer a binge. There were a few drunks on the train, but none dared to enter the dining car, and no alcohol was sold. The carriages were cleaner, and the officials fairly good-natured, and the passengers more prosperous looking. Still, at the longer stops, when I was strolling down the station platform I was buttonholed by Russians who asked: Want to sell your shoes? Want to sell your jeans? Want to sell your T-shirt? Perhaps it was only my imagination, but it seemed to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with a country whose citizens asked to buy your underwear.